Prefabrications experiments - 239 - drawings and representations - 10 - Cedric Price's Steel House and Letraset drawing device

The steel house, an icon of progress, remains an icon of prefabrication and a somewhat charged counter-proposal to the established balloon frame or lightweight timber platform frame. The case for steel was intrenched in its newness, stability, normalization, strength, and simplified assembly and disassembly of ready-made and ready to use components. Steel construction in housing proposals, ranged from folded plate elements inspired by car production to the skeletal structures informed by the displacement of timber construction patterns to iron and then to steel. The main advantage of steel over timber or masonry during modernity was conveyed through open frameworks with larger spans. Achieved with fewer material constraints, steel frames liberated classic planning principles as they eliminated the need for bearing walls. Further, the progression of steel components, standardized and catalogued, made it possible to envision customizable, modernized and adaptable prefabrication systems based on off the shelf pieces. 

Steel house proposals by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Charles and Ray Eames acknowledged steel as a robust, manageable and adaptable material while emphasizing the open frame as a device for shaping spaces for evolving lifestyles. The conceptualization of the steel skeleton associated with modernity evolved into ideals of planning flexibility. Cedric Price’s Steel House project developed in the late 1960s is a notable example of the sequence between frame and open planning. Based on a series of juxtaposed modular steel supports, service and cladding modules orient adjustable planning possibilities underscored by the steel frame’s grid. Articulated to the idea of representing a freedom to plan and change within an evolving lifestyle, Price provided not only a process for open building, but a device for sharing his plan. The Letraset drawing tool, well-known to older generations of architects, provided a transfer method for the predefined kit elements and components to design, organize and draw a steel house according to Cedric Price’s method. The designer simply traces each component to transfer it to a drawing. Perhaps an ancestor of open source design, the shared Letraset transfer overlay included Price’s standardized language for infinite iterations. A normalized understanding of customizable design, Price’s representation tool framed changeable life pattern possibilities through a constant and democratic architectural position. 

Letraset overlay for Steel House

  

Prefabrication experiments - 238 - drawings and representations - 09 - Prefabrication's open language

For many, the idea of prefabrication connotes mass-produced cookie-cutter buildings with little or no customization potentials. The personalization of prefabricated architectural systems is an entrenched obstacle to the industrialization of architecture and construction. The prevailing position of architects exploring prefabrication has been to argue either for uniqueness or for open systems based on component flexibility leveraged toward varying shapes, geometries and uses. 

Walter Gropius and Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s positions symbolize the pursuit of  an unrestricted prefab. Both argued for an industrialized architecture assembled coherently by talented architects creating a strain of designs from preset parts. In line with this open strategy and while arguing for their Ecologic Building Systems in wood, steel and concrete, Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler proposed a metaphor for their kit-of-parts architecture that is still interpreted, used and articulated in both academia and practice to illustrate a permissive relationship between components and their infinite variability. This model is presented below and hinges on sharing a basic structure and syntax. Prefabricated elements are to architecture what the alphabet is to literature, what notes are to music and what colors and shapes are to painting. If a writer develops a style through the same basic use of letters, words and sentences, it is certainly possible for architects to deploy pre-defined components and details to develop their own unique architecture. 

Still, the point at issue is - where does singularity lie in architecture ? Most components are mass-produced and so singularity rests in a coherent way these parts are assembled. If industrialized building systems predefine this coherence, then an argument can be made that they stint an architect’s capacity to offer a signature detail. The same kit-of-parts ideal that allowed for the Cutlers to define prefabrication as a language of parts in today’s increasingly digitalized sector would make it possible to define a very personal kit-of-parts manufactured specifically for each project. As digital fabrication evolves the language metaphor can be taken one step further and a designer could envision an alphabet as a singular undertaking. Then prefab could be analogous not with letters and language but with the many typefaces that can be used and developed for personal use.

Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler's representation of the relationship between prefabrication and the alphabet

Prefabrication experiments - 237 - drawings and representations - 08 - Car Production as an Analogue

As a result of the process evolutions brought on by the industrial evolution, many sectors progressed concurrently while others were invented and offered opportunities for cross pollinating new methods and knowledge. Automobile production and the Ford assembly line specifically epitomized how complex products could be made affordable while gaining in qualitative aspects like quality control, metrics and repetition. Car production still symbolizes industrialization’s gains and advances. After Ford, the Toyota «lean» production method and more recently mass customization models continue to inspire builders, architects, industrialists and inventors to appropriate car production and leverage its instructions for the building sector. This ideal, supported by many during the 20th century, is still in many ways haunting the prefabricated building sector. 

One of many representations that compare building prefabrication to car production, Albert Farwell Bemis’ model in the schematic below is perhaps the theory most architects modelled their practice for achieving an architecture made from industrialized parts and pieces. Postwar tract housing, also validates this model; individualization was kept to a minimum. The model identified industrialization as a coordinated layering of systems. Even as it is clear that buildings and automobiles share certain systemic principles as frame and chassis (today’s industry sometimes uses the equally connotated car terminology: platfom), the building has one main differentiating element: Site and context. The systemic layering admitted that houses, while idealized as singular productions, share most of the basic housing elements, materials and methods. Bemis imagined the foundation as an anchor as other building components could be repeated from project to project – a personalized modularity. 

Bemis’ research and proposals addressed every aspect of building production as harmonizing mass production with supply chains through a regulated layering of systems and coordinated dimensions so that architects could manage projects holistically. Still widely applied, his layering acknowledged that a building would never be completely mass produced, along with aesthetic reasons, anchorage, earthwork, and grounding define architecture’s unicity. Even today, as prefab / industrialization and off-site construction are revived by issues of productivity and technology so are some weak, archaic and outmoded production models for architecture’s mass production. Bemis’s analogue identified similarities and sought to define a manner to attain uniqueness.

Bemis' rationalized comparison with car production

Prefabrication experiments - 236 - drawings and representations - 07 - The weightless adaptability of the Plas-2-Point

Fostered in an industrial society and influenced by historical processes, construction has developed into the articulate assembly of disparate elements for each individual project. Technical drawings associate individual parts to a whole. The unit to whole correlation is fundamental to the conceptual language of architectural design and elucidating how elements fit together. During modernity in architecture, this unit to whole synchronisation underlined a component based and systematic layering of pieces, parts, functions and spaces. Architecture and its manufactured parts were to be easily assembled or even disassembled to be redeployed in any other contexts or to serve varying needs.

While this unit to whole connection was in essence an interpretation of industrial production and its techniques, it endorsed the notion of a universally adaptable and flexible space idealizing a democratization of architecture. Two of the main themes of this universality included minimal building footprint, keeping earthwork to a minimum, and eliminating any bearing elements restricting planning freedom. This idealization of free panning and simplicity was translated by representations that expressed three modern tenets: mobility, assembly and adaptability. 

Rendered by Marcel Breuer in the drawing sheet below, the Plas-2-Point prototype certainly checks all the parameters; An open and free space floating over two bearing elements. The house’s structural system, envisioned as a shell or wing structure included identical but mirrored roof trusses and floor trusses tapered from the outer points toward a central vertical girder or beam that transferred the loads to two vertical stone posts. The space between the inverted floor and roof structure was completely free of structural constraints and could be organized according to user needs. 

Breuer’s representation of balance and harmony is an equally modern canon. The house is symmetrical both in plan and section and could theoretically use the same components for the floor and roof structure. Although the Plas-2-Point was never produced, Breuer’s design identified and underlined the era’s zeitgeist for creative building systems inspired by a type of weightless architecture. The house’s representation also epitomized a perception of mass production - a house could be designed and its methods represented on one drawing sheet. Analogous to a patent drawing, the vision was whole and comprehensive.

Plas-2-Point prefabricated house, elevation drawings, designed by Marcel Breuer, 1942. Marcel Breuer papers, 1920-1986. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Prefabrication experiments - 235 - drawings and representations - 06 - Glenn Murcutt and the exactness of drawings

The practice, scope and exactitude of today’s architectural drawings derives from an important evolution in architectural communication before and after industrialization. Architecture and construction influenced by mass production developed into the rational assembly of manufactured and catalogued components. Post-industrial technical drawings instructed builders replacing clerkships and craft-based traditions and knowledge sharing. The extent to which an architect details his/her designs signals how obsessive he/she is about how things ought to be put together. The modern architect used drawings to verbalize knowledge about components and processes. Systemic integration was key in drawings as they indicated the coherent union of disparate building elements. Holistic architectural thought merged with industrial production to underline modernity’s obsession with detailing. 

A masterful talent for drawing posited a comprehensive attitude toward architecture and construction. This relationship between drawing, architecture, assembly and construction is remarkably displayed in the drawings of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. By integrating industrialized components in an overall project vision through careful and meticulous detailing, Murcutt’s work is recognized both through beautiful built works and intricate drawings. Murcutt’s conversant assembly of basic industrialized components was arguably shaped by the colonization of Australia, perhaps best represented by the Iron houses shipped from Great Britain during the gold rush. Corrugated iron simply fastened to iron struts and beams made for a simple no frills building system. This type of simple building strategy anchored in tradition produces a specifically rooted modernism in Murcutt’s designs. 

Murcutt’s drawings reveal a preoccupation for describing, listing, itemizing, juxtaposing and ordering components and their fastenings. The section drawing shown below for Murcutt’s Alderton House (1992) is a typical Murcutt production. The architect’s attention to detail is applied to every aspect of systemic integration from the project’s anchorage to its site through foundations to how piping from plumbing equipment can be organized. The section uses varying line thicknesses to masterfully illustrate parts that are is sectioned from parts that are not, to clarify depth, space, scale as well as specific components. Murcutt’s drawings are fundamental to understanding how detail is perceived in contemporary architecture. Not only is it a way of bringing building parts together but doing so to achieve an overall harmonic understanding of the total project.

Alderton house section - scanned from private book collection